by T. A. Pratt
Don’t look back. It wasn’t meant literally. It didn’t mean “Don’t turn your head,” it meant “Don’t remember.” Because how could your lover live, if you knew she had died? How could you go on loving her, with the weight of that knowledge, with all that interrupted grief clogging up your head? You had to forget it all, drink the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and afterward you’d never understand why your lover was afraid of subway stations and cemeteries, why she refused to go to your aunt’s funeral with you, why she wept on gray days and stared off into the middle distance as if she were looking at things you’d never be able to see. Because she wouldn’t forget about her death. Just you.
I thought about all the gray, hollow people I’d met in my life, shuffling through their days, as if they were swathed in shrouds no one else could see, and I wondered how many of them had been dead, once upon a time, and come back, and remembered.
I looked at the sinuous lizards, at their indifferent grace. They would lead me to H., if I let them. I would find my dead lover holding a needle full of Lethe-water, more potent than any drug we’d taken in the old days, and then what? Would we go back in time? Would I be a star again, with H. by my side? A strangely quiet H., still doing drugs but for a different reason, trying to forget something he knew I would never remember again?
Because the dead know things, even if they come back to life, and because it is still up to the living to act, to choose.
Was I willing to forget all the pain, everything I’d learned since H.’s death, in order to bring him back, to have him suffer, and remember, and be lost to me again someday?
“The bees can sting you,” E. said to Jay. “They can sting the loss away, and then I can follow you back. If you want.” She sounded totally indifferent.
“Don’t you want to come with me?” Jay asked.
“It’s up to you.”
“Of course I want you back,” he said, and walked into the black and yellow mist of bees.
I turned and walked away, taking big ground-eating steps. The lizards followed me, paced me, and I started running to get away from them, from their cool green temptation. I wept as I ran. I wondered if H. would understand why I was running away, if he would want it this way, too.
I found the train, and its doors hissed open at my approach. The lizards hung back among the stone trees, watching me.
I looked back at them, for a long moment, then wiped the tears from my eyes. I got on the train. Jay would find his own way back, into the sun, and E. with him. But he would never understand why she didn’t want to go outside, why she was so afraid of bees and dark places, and he would leave her eventually, I think, because the strange sad girl who came back would not be the woman he’d loved. That was Jay’s trial, his price to pay.
“Doors are closing,” the driver whispered over the speaker, in tones of warning. These doors wouldn’t open again, not for me. This was my one and only trip on this train, at least while I was alive.
“Let them close,” I said, and rode back through the emptiness in the belly of the night, toward another morning, having nothing but my memories, but holding tightly to those, holding them as though they were worth all the rest of my life.
A Cloak of Many Worlds
Here’s a story about Bradley from much later, when he’s the ruler of the multiverse, a composite being created from all the versions of B from every parallel universe. Remember that purple-and-white cloak Marla had, that turned out to be an evil interdimensional parasite? Bradley agreed to get rid of it for Marla, but... it didn’t quite work out.
Bradley Bowman—known, in most realities, as “B” to his friends—was getting pretty good at being a god. He hadn’t gotten much in the way of training, as his predecessor had died (or, more accurately, committed suicide), but since one of the perks of the position was a vastly enhanced mental capacity and total mastery of time, space, and the multiverse, he’d figured out things pretty well just by muddling along.
He was more than a god, really. Gods feared him—at least, those that believed in him did.
B sat at a small wrought-iron table in a gazebo in an imaginary garden, buttering a real piece of toast. When he took a sounding, he found an amazing 89% of himself was at least content, and 67% would have gone so far as to call it “happy.” A good morning, then. One of the best.
His lover, Henry, sat across from him, reading a French-language newspaper from a world where Napoleon’s empire had spanned the entire globe and persisted for two centuries. Henry had died of a drug overdose in most of the universes B had visited—back in timelines when B was still mortal, and so capable of uncomplicated linear heartbreak. B had taken advantage of his position to scoop one particular instance of his lover from a doomed timeline and taken him here, to the house outside space-time, to live as B’s immortal companion.
He was pretty sure such things were against the rules, except, as far as he could tell, there were very few rules, and no one to enforce them anyway. As long as he didn’t damage the structure of reality itself (an act which would be instantly self-negating, like a fire choosing to extinguish itself) he could do what he liked. There were other Powers his equal or better—he’d met them, he was sure, when he “interviewed” for this job—but thinking about them was like trying to look at the back of his own head.
Once he’d tried to save a few versions of himself who’d died unpleasantly in the past, but without success; he could see them, but trying to touch them was like squeezing smoke. There weren’t many rules... but there were, apparently, a few fundamental laws that couldn’t be worked around.
B’s job was to protect the integrity of the multiverse. To prevent creatures—apart from himself, and he didn’t count—from passing from one reality to another, shredding the fabric of space-time as they went. To guard against incursions from Outside, that mysterious space (or collection of spaces) where other entirely different universes bubbled in the quantum foam, and from In-Between, the dark shadows between the branches of parallel and proliferating realities, where dwelt terrible predators composed of equal parts biology and geometry.
His domain was not infinite, but it was very large, and ever-growing, as with each passing moment, in each universe, new choices were made right down at the quantum level, each choice spawning a new universe, endlessly branching, endlessly diverging. But B could be everywhere at once, if need be; so that was all right. And it wasn’t as if there were many real dangers. Cross-dimensional travel was rare, the dwellers In-Between mostly seemed happy to stay there eating any foolish sorcerers or science-explorers who breached their domains, and as for Outside, well—
“I dreamed about the cloak again,” Henry said, not looking up from the paper. He was blond, young, handsome, a lock of hair falling across his pale green eyes at almost all times, and his voice poured like honey when he said the least little thing.
B frowned. Contentment levels in the collective dropped precipitously. “Shit,” he said.
“Once is happenstance,” Henry said, rustling the paper. “Twice is coincidence. Three times—”
“Yes, I know,” B said, and put down his toast.
B contained multitudes. He’d once been a mortal man, living a mortal life. He’d existed in tens of thousands of realities—but when he chose to accept this position, the wave-forms had collapsed, and he’d become a single individual, effortlessly containing the memories and experiences of all his counterparts. He thought of himself sometimes as “the collective,” since he was an amalgam of many, acting as one. He could spread out again, near-infinitely, sending versions of himself wherever they were needed in the expanse of time and space, every copy in continuous psychic contact with the main body, but after that breakfast most of him was together, standing on the frozen emptiness of a version of Earth that had drifted a bit farther from the sun than most, becoming a ball of nothing much but dirty ice, utterly lifeless.
There were a pair of cloaks wadded-up at his feet, made of pale white cloth, lined inside with
an ugly bruise-purple, the color even more shocking than usual in this pale wasteland. “You little shits,” he said, kicking one of the cloaks. “How are you getting inside his head? I know you whisper and tempt and wiggle your little psychic fish-hooks into people’s brains, but Henry isn’t even in this reality, he’s not in any reality, we’re curled up in a separate dimension. So how the fuck...”
Not for the first time, B considered picking up the cloaks and hurling them into a sun—or a black hole. The problem was, he couldn’t be sure what consequences that might have for the sun, or the singularity.
In many of the universes where B had been mortal, he’d made friends with a sorcerer named Marla Mason, who often possessed a magical purple-and-white cloak, an artifact of great power. In many of those universes, she discovered the cloak was a malign psychic entity bent on the utter domination of the world. Without a host body—a wearer, essentially—the cloak was largely inert, capable only of small telepathic whispers. Once it found a host to wear it, though, the cloak tried to possess the wearer’s body, and from there... onward to conquest, working magics that were unmatched in the multiverse.
On many of the worlds where Marla wore the cloak, she was unable to resist the cloak’s power, and became a genocidal tyrant. Bradley had stepped in on a micro level not long ago, as a favor to a version of Marla he was particularly fond of, and he’d taken a couple of instances of the cloak away, putting them here in this wasteland, where they could do no more harm.
The cloaks worried him, though, because they were from Outside—the only Outsiders he’d ever encountered. They didn’t belong to his multiverse, but came from some other entirely different universe. The physics (and metaphysics) of B’s multiverse didn’t apply to them—in some senses, this place was inimical to them, and the cloaks needed a physical host to support them just like an astronaut needed a space suit to function in the airless depths.
But in other ways, this multiverse was easy pickings for the cloaks; their magics were all but unstoppable here. And of course there were more of them every day, every moment, as the multiverse continued to branch, spawning new copies of the cloak with each variation. Sure, many of them were lost, or locked away, or sleeping and lying dormant without hosts, and they were all stuck in their respective realities, but still—they were wrong, and their existence troubled him.
Clearly, they had powers B didn’t begin to understand, and since he was supposed to understand everything in his multiverse, that was irksome. He needed to know where they’d come from, and what they wanted, and how they were whispering to his boyfriend... and how serious a threat they posed.
Fortunately, he was in a position to find out.
Henry followed him, but just to the top of the basement stairs. “Are you... you really have to go down there?”
B shrugged. “Some of them know things I need to find out.”
Henry blew a mouthful of smoke toward the ceiling—no reason to avoid cigarettes, here; they were beyond things like cancer—and nodded. “Okay. I just know how much they creep you out.”
“The basement’s not my favorite place,” B agreed. “But sooner started, sooner done.” He unhooked the padlock on the door—which was much more than an ordinary padlock, of course—and pulled it open. He descended solid stone stairs to a space so well-lit not a single shadow could collect in the corners. The walls were lined with man-sized glass containers, curved at the top like bell jars, each one holding a different version of B himself, their eyes closed, motionless but dreaming.
One Bradley was so disfigured he was barely recognizable, face a collage of scars, dressed in the shreds of a military uniform that was clearly from the Hugo Boss school of stylish fascism. Another was missing half his head, the damaged parts of brain and skull repaired with shiny metal plates and alien technology. A third had shockingly snow-white hair, and his left arm had been replaced by a long, blue-black tentacle that twitched and writhed even in the depths of suspension.
These were the versions of Bradley Bowman that had been purged from the collective. They were insane, or power-hungry, or otherwise dangerous, all from worlds that had suffered terrible agonies at the hands (or claws, or mandibles) of supernatural or extraterrestrial menaces—since B was a powerful psychic in nearly every reality, he was often dragged into the plots of such creatures, and sometimes terribly changed in the process.
The imprisoned version of himself that B needed to address today was fairly typical in his appearance, but reaching out to him mentally, B felt the void at the center of him, the profoundness of his broken places, the depth of his hunger. His neck was terribly scarred, as if he’d been scourged with a whip of needles; and in a way, he had. That version of B called himself the Host.
There were several realities in which B briefly wore the purple-and-white cloak, taking on the power and burden temporarily from his friend Marla Mason to help save the life of another. But this Bradley, the Host, for whatever reason, had lacked the willpower to resist the cloak’s whispering for even an afternoon. He had submitted to the cloak’s will, slaughtered Marla... and over the course of the next year, combining his own vast psychic gifts with the cloak’s brutal magics, he’d subjugated the entire Earth. He’d lost his empire when all the versions of B combined and ascended to meta-godhood, leaving his empire in shambles (and the cloak itself abandoned, and in need of another host).
Most of the cloak’s hosts lost their minds when they were possessed, becoming vestigial things, but because of his psychic powers, the Host had managed to wall off part of his psyche, keeping it whole and intact. Unfortunately... he’d come to love the cloak. To love the power. The ability to do anything, without consequence or hesitation. His presence in the collective had been intolerable, like having a splinter in your eye, so B had sealed him away here... but now he needed the man’s insight.
B touched the glass jar. It shimmered out of existence, and the Host opened his sea-blue eyes.
A conceptual shift later, B sat in a steel chair in an interrogation room that lacked windows or doors. The Host sat across the scarred metal table from him, draped in chains. He smiled, showing teeth sharpened to points, then lashed out psychically, trying to seize control of the collective. It was a hopeless gesture—he was outnumbered literally tens of thousands to one—but B still reeled backwards under the ferocity of the assault.
“Well,” the Host said. “Worth a try. I didn’t become ruler of the world by never making an effort.”
“You weren’t the ruler of a world,” B said. “You were just the mount the ruler of a world rode.”
The Host shrugged. “The cloak and I had a more equal partnership than you’d like to admit. She burned the humanity out of me, to let me achieve my true potential, and she accepted my counsel.”
“Oh, I know that,” B said. “Which is why you’re here. I want to know about the cloak. What it is. Where it came from. What it’s doing here.”
The Host raised an eyebrow. “You’re something more than a god, brother. But you are wholly ignorant of the cloak’s true nature. Doesn’t that tell you something? Doesn’t that make you realize the cloak deserves to have dominion over this multiverse?”
“A case could be made,” B said. “Except for the bit where she wants to eradicate all other life.”
The Host shrugged. The scars on his neck where the cloak had clung, sinking the needles of its pseudopods deep into his flesh, were red, as if still infected. “You can’t blame her. Would you want to move into a house infested with roaches and centipedes, the bathtub full of slime eels, spiders in the pillows, slugs in the cupboards? That’s what we are to her—what all life is. She needs to keep a breeding pool of sentient creatures around, of course, to act as hosts, since our reality is unpleasant for her—it makes her very sleepy, like a lack of oxygen does for humans—but otherwise... things are much more beautiful without the slime mold of life everywhere. I came to see things her way.”
“I know all that. Tell me what I don’t kn
ow. Where does she—it—come from?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“I’m prepared to bargain,” B said. “I’ll bud you off, and give you your own existence, and put you on an Earth capable of sustaining your life, but one that hasn’t developed any sentient species. You’ll get to live in a natural paradise, which is better than you deserve.”
“A planet teeming with things I can kill? Interesting.” The Host showed his teeth again. This time, he licked them, and the points of his teeth drew blood from his tongue.
Hours later—not that time mattered here, but subjectively, it had been a long day—B sat at the table in the gazebo staring down into a cup of espresso. “The cloak comes from another multiverse. From Outside. Which, I mean—I figured. But what I didn’t know is, the reason it’s here.”
“Vanguard of an invasion force?” Henry sat with his arms crossed over his chest, frowning. Despite how distracted he was, a good 40% of the collective admired the way Henry’s crossed arms made his biceps bulge.
B shook his head. “No. The cloak was a criminal in its own reality. ‘Criminal’ isn’t exactly the right word, apparently—they don’t make a distinction between natural laws and laws created by sentient beings there, but apparently it’s possible to break natural laws, don’t ask me how. The cloak—the thing we call the cloak—did that. And being sent to our universe was its punishment. Banishment. Exile.”
Henry frowned. “Wait. So we’re like... Australia? And the cloak is a British convict? Our multiverse is a penal colony?”
“More or less. With just a single prisoner. Except, of course, this being a multiverse, that prisoner has multiplied, in a way.”
“So... why am I dreaming about it?”
B winced. “This part, I figured out for myself. I fucked up, Henry. I had two cloaks together in one reality, and I took them both to a third reality, one with an uninhabited Earth, doing my own attempt at banishing them. They’re Outsiders, so it doesn’t exactly break my rules to put two of them in one reality, even though usually duplicates inhabiting the same reality is a no-no, one of the things I’m meant to guard against. The cloaks are... sort of outside my jurisdiction, so it’s okay. But I think passing through the membranes between realities that many times taught them something. The cloaks have senses we can’t even imagine, and since I’m capable of simultaneously watching everything throughout the past and into possible futures in every reality, those are some badass senses.” He ran a hand through his hair. “The cloaks must have figured out something about reaching through the membranes, even in their dormant state, when they’re just capable of whispering. So they’re whispering to you, Henry. They know they can’t overcome me—I’m billions of powerful psychics rolled into one—but you’re a singular creature, and a potential host.”
